A spouse, and a steward
In current English a husband is a man named in relation to the person he has married. The same spelling still works as a verb: to husband time, money, or fuel is to spend it carefully. Those two jobs look unrelated until the older household sense is put back in view. The origin of the word husband sits in that house-and-land meaning, not in courtship.
British usage still keeps a quieter noun sense, a manager of someone else’s property. Archaic English also used the word for a thrifty keeper of stores, and for a tiller of ground. Husbandry and husbandman grew from that same stock.
A northern compound in Old English
The modern form comes through Middle English spellings such as housbond, hosebonde, and husbond. Behind them stands Old English husbonda, already in use before the year 1000. In that period the usual force of the compound was householder: the male head of a household, a landowner, the master of a house. It appears in a gospel translation in a comment after Matthew 20:28, where the husbonda is the host who can tell a guest to give up the best seat. Ælfric used it in his late-tenth-century rendering of Exodus. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1048 records a húsbunda killed at his own hearth after a quarrel over lodging.
Standard dictionaries treat the Old English compound as coming from Old Norse húsbóndi, master of the house, literally house-dweller. The Danelaw made that path easy: Norse settlers and English speakers shared Germanic roots and lived in the same countryside. Whether English borrowed the whole Norse word, or rebuilt it from native hus plus a Norse-shaped bonda, is a finer point. Some accounts call the Old English form a calque; others present it as a borrowing, or at least as probably Norse. The pieces themselves were not foreign. English already had hus for house, and bonda is attested in Old English legal prose as a householder, even as a married man in relation to wife and children. Cnut’s second law code uses bonda that way in a succession clause.
The word is not a late French import. It is a North Sea household term that English already possessed in the late Old English period, shaped by contact with Norse.
House plus the one who dwells
The first half is hus, the ordinary Germanic word for house, from Proto-Germanic *hūsą. The second half is the interesting one. Old Norse bóndi, from older búandi or bóandi, is a present participle of búa, to dwell, to keep a household. A bóndi was a householder, a freeholder, a peasant with land and stock. That verb belongs to the Indo-European root reconstructed as *bʰuH- or *bheue-, to be, exist, grow. English boor, Dutch boer, and German Bauer sit on the same dwelling-and-farming branch, though they reached English by other routes.
On the surface, then, a husband is a house-dweller: the person who occupies and runs the house, not originally the person tied by a wedding. Later English speakers sometimes linked the second syllable with bond and bound, as if a husband were a man yoked by obligation. After the Norman Conquest the social range of bond-words in English narrowed toward serf and slave, which made that false link easier. The dwell etymology and the bind folk-story are not the same history.
A minority older view argued that Old English bonda and bunda came from bindan, to bind, because the vowel in those forms is short, whereas the dwell-verb in both Norse and Old English has a long vowel. On that reading husbonda would be a native English compound and not a Norse loan at all. Mainstream etymology has not followed that argument. The usual account keeps the Norse house-dweller analysis, while leaving room for the calque-versus-loan uncertainty. The length of the vowel is a real philological issue; it is not grounds for inventing a tidy bind-and-wed story.
Old English also had a feminine counterpart, hūsbonde, mistress of a house. Had that word survived, it would now sound identical to husband. It did not survive as a living kinship term. The pairing that did last is uneven: wife is native Old English wīf, originally woman as well as married woman, while husband is the Norse-shaped household word.
From master of the house to married man
The shift that matters for modern readers is not a sudden rebranding. A master of a house was very often a married man. By the late thirteenth century the word had taken over as the ordinary term for a married man in relation to his wife, and it settled in as the partner of wife. What it displaced was Old English wer, a man, a male person. Wer did not vanish without a trace; it is the first half of werewolf.
The householder sense did not die at once. In early Middle English a husband could still be the person who managed an estate, a forest, or a store of goods: the duties of the head of a house, specified. English of that kind is already inserted into Anglo-Latin texts in the early twelfth century. From the steward sense came the verb, recorded in the early fifteenth century, to manage resources thriftily. The mid-fifteenth-century noun sense steward is now chiefly British or archaic, but the verb is ordinary: people still husband supplies. Husbandry kept the management sense and, in animal husbandry, the farming one. A husbandman was a tiller of the ground. None of this needs a separate etymology; it is the old householder stretched across land, livestock, and later metaphor.
Slang hubby is much later, attested by the 1680s, a clipped pet form of the marital sense, not of the steward.
Cognates keep the older social colour. Swedish husbonde still points toward a master of a household or a landlord as readily as toward a spouse. In Icelandic, húsbóndi remains a house-master; for a married man everyday speech more often uses maðurinn, the man. English followed its own slope, from free householder toward the marital partner we mean now.
What still shows
The word that names a married man in English is a house word. Its second half is a dweller, not a vow. If a detail is worth keeping in mind, it is that wer, the older English word for the man beside a wife, survives in werewolf, while husband still carries, in the verb, the thrift of someone who has a house to run.